The tent itself came into being due to some comments initially from Vicky. On Sunday, a few days after the sighting of the scarab beetle at the framing store, I took the bus down Magnolia as I usually did to my aunt and uncle’s home for our weekly dinner together. This had been a standing date on the calendar since I’d moved out of their house for college and beyond, and always included that call to my mother after the meal to check in. Her sentence wandering during the last week’s phone call had led to my aunt paging the facility psychiatrist, which was the usual routine; it was always my aunt who took on this task. Their parents had died years before, but even when alive, they had not ever taken charge of their eldest daughter’s care with my aunt’s level of detail and rigor. She had a small coral pink notebook on her desk with lists of medication names and amounts, and a series of files marked E on her computer. Doctor numbers on her phone. New doctors listed after the old doctors left. Printed articles about new treatments on tables and countertops, with bolded, underlined sentences to ask about on her next call.
She’d been on hold at Hawthorne House for a while last week, so I’d gone home while she was still waiting on the phone, and Vicky had reported to me that when she had finally completed the call, the medication had been changed, and my aunt retreated to the sofa in the living room with a glass of wine that remained undrunk, just staring at the off TV, breathing, unmoving, as we’d seen her do after similar interventions so many times before. The sense I always had of her in those times was of a person allowing a stress to physically pass through her. We knew not to talk to her. The wine was a prop that made it all look more presentable. Uncle Stan, also according to Vicky, had come home late from his job on the crew of the second sequel of the action film series that had been financially stabilizing for years but that was currently in production and taking up a lot of his extra time, and when he saw my aunt there, he quietly undid the dishwasher, and then went upstairs to talk to Vicky about a pool party that had been a source of familial war all week long.
That afternoon, I entered the house, and after I greeted my aunt and hugged and thanked her, giving her the carton of blueberries she’d requested, while she chopped up zucchini and onions to the sounds of news radio and waved me and my offer to help away, I went up the stairs to Vicky’s bedroom, past the Vermont lamb/goat drawings, and the small framed sketches of jumping figures that my mother had drawn many years ago in an art therapy class in which the teacher had praised her sense of joy. Someone—most likely my aunt—had recently vacuumed, and on the stairs and at the landing, slanted sections of carpet showed areas of darkening purple, then lighter, then darker, in parallelograms of carpet fiber. Somewhere across the house, a vacuum bag rested beneath a plastic handle, puffed with the tiny bits of their lives, fingernails, dust, pretzel crumbs, hair.
Vicky, at that point, was soon to start twelfth grade. Already she was busy preparing for the school fall play, as lead lighting designer, and also making a list of schools to apply to, all of which had strong theater departments, though she had explained to me that she was not sure if she would rather do lighting design, or act, or write plays, or possibly stage-manage, or maybe direct. Any of the above, she’d told me. All of the above. The college application process was already stressful, and earlier in the week, she had sent me the three latest possibilities for her essay—one about her love of theater, another about her brief and frustrating interlude with soccer, and the third, her favorite, the one that her English teacher had liked best. I liked it too. It was a good essay. It was about her sister, who was really her cousin, who joined the family at the age of eight due to a spike in her mother’s mental illness, and how she had made the family more interesting, and provided Vicky with true inspiration in her life.
“Come in!” Vicky called when she heard my footsteps on the stairs.
For a moment, I hovered at the landing. After I’d moved out, my bedroom, next to hers, had swiftly reverted to its role as half-office/exercise space, and I took a step closer and peeked inside. The bed was still in there, covered now with piles of books and clothing, and the printer began whirring from its new spot on the desk where I’d never done any of my homework, preferring always to work in Vicky’s room instead. The old painted rainbow/cloud on the wall was now covered by the return of the rolled yoga mats and a secondhand standing bicycle I’d bought for my aunt a few years back at a sale in Van Nuys which she seemed to pedal happily on the rare rainy days.
I found Vicky cross-legged on her bed with her laptop open. “Printing a new copy for you right now,” she said, glancing up. “I just looked at your site. It looks really good. Are those new bracelets?”
She darted up to grab the pages. I went to her computer to scroll through the site, to see how it looked on her screen, and when she came back told her how I’d found the bracelets dust-encrusted, in a jangle of jewelry in a pile just down the block at a surprise sale, not even really planning to look. They’d been a dollar apiece, and I was selling them, clean and sparkly, for twenty each now. One already had been bought by a woman in the Florida Keys.
Vicky listened carefully, with her gold-colored eyes, as she usually did. A ponytail sprouted from the top of her head.
“Two thousand percent markup,” she said. “Not bad. Is it true you’re going to quit your job?”
“I think so. I think I’m making enough.”
“Amazing,” she said. I had already settled into my usual spot at the end of her bed, and she sat down next to me, hitting her foot against mine. “You’d be your own boss,” she said.
“Exactly. Aunt Minn thinks it might be a bit rash—”
“She thinks everything is rash. You should totally do it.”
We sat facing her door, with the edges of all her old door stickers visible, just the white sticker back left, pictures gone. It was like she was already leaving, had already left. In a year, I’d be showing up to Sunday dinners with my aunt and uncle and sitting across the table from them, alone.
“Essay?” I said.
Vicky handed over the printed pages and pulled up the file on her computer.
“Knock yourself out,” she said, tossing over a pen.
We sat side by side, working. I read quietly and circled some words, and she tapped around on her laptop. When I was ready, we went through the essay twice together, her reading parts aloud, us reordering a paragraph together and strengthening some of the word choices. At a natural pause, she opened a spreadsheet to show me where she was planning to apply; she’d made a careful list, with each college and its requirements and deadlines and the things she liked best about what she’d read or seen. These were schools located all around the country, none in Los Angeles, as I’d suspected: New York, New Haven, San Diego, Berkeley, Austin, Michigan, more. She highlighted one of the lines and quickly typed in some information she’d learned about financial aid. Below us, the salty smell of baking cheese drifted up from downstairs.
“Do you remember the story of the butterfly?” I asked, watching her letters fill the open slots.
“Of course,” she said.
“I’ve been thinking about it a lot this week.”
“Which part?”
“All the parts. And some other parts.”
“Anything new?”
“It’s just been bubbling up,” I said. “The beetle too. I’m not sure why.”
Her eyes blinked at me, the way they did sometimes, friendly but also tunneling in, ready to bulldoze me with devotion, and to my relief, Aunt Minn called us down to set the table. “I’m so glad you’re here,” Vicky said, in a low voice, as we tripped down the stairs. “It’s been extra rough with her with Dad out so much and this party coming up. All week long. I think it’s getting worse.” “It?” “She. I don’t know. You know what I mean.” She went to gather forks and spoons from the silverware drawer, while I folded paper towels into napkins. Aunt Minn, lips pursed as if already trying to hold words inside herself, brought in the zucchini casserole between hands padded by oven mitts, and after I lit the tall candle in its silver boat, the three of us sat down to dinner. Uncle Stan was working overtime for at least two more weeks.
Aunt Minn and Vicky spoke in clipped tones, pass the zucchini, please, pass the rice, please, thank you, the hostility peppered with courtesy like balloons tied to lead weights, and as we ate, to offer some relief, I told a few stories about the yard sales I’d recently visited, including the man who’d tried to sell all his old mix tapes for two dollars apiece, and the woman in Alhambra who had probably a hundred different tangled extension and USB cords spilling from a gigantic box. They both listened closely. It seemed to be helping ease the tension at the table, and my aunt smiled with warmth in her eyes, eating slowly, which was a good sign because sometimes when worried she forgot to eat at all, so I kept going and started talking next about the babysitter’s porcelain soap dish, and how I’d just had a thought the other day about how it had been shaped like a little dinghy, and how lovely it had been, with its graceful bar of lavender soap inside. “She had such a beautiful apartment,” I said. “It was like a fairyland to me.” “Did you ever visit her, after you moved?” Vicky asked, and I said no, though she’d sent me a few cards here and there. “Sometimes a birthday card,” I said. “I think.” The two of them kept their eyes pinned on me. Vicky spoke about lavender, and why it was her favorite smell, and my aunt joined in and said she also very much liked lavender, and then Vicky said she thought maybe she preferred rosemary, and I laughed a little at both of them, and then Vicky said, circling a long string of cheese around her fork, that it was true that whenever I talked about my Portland memories, they did have this sticky, three-dimensional quality to her, like they could be washed off, or picked at.
“I don’t know how to describe it, but I just remember those things you say differently than other things,” she said, waving her fork. “Like, it makes me feel like I have to wash my hands. But not in a bad way.”
“Of course not,” I said, “in that great sticky hands kind of way.”
Aunt Minn laughed softly, pressing her fork tines sideways into her zucchini slice until the cooked flesh split through the metal.
“You two,” she said.
We talked for a while about soap dishes, and how maybe I should have a designated part of my shop only for unique soap dishes, and both of them were so enthusiastic about the topic that it was obviously only there to block further discussion of Sammy’s pool party the next weekend. Sammy’s parents were never around and Sammy had once come to school drunk and Aunt Minn wanted assurance, possibly in writing, that Vicky would not drink or do drugs while she was there, which Vicky found too formal and not necessary and said she really was only interested in swimming, anyway, and maybe hanging out with a guy from her history class. This I had been hearing about from both sides all week long. Aunt Minn wanted to be sure Vicky knew very clearly about the family’s history of psychotic breaks, and her own risk factors, and Vicky said the main risk factor in her life was the act of being bathed in constant anxiety, and they had said this to each other in new and varied ways all the time, like an overplayed duet on the radio. At the end of the meal, Aunt Minn went to the kitchen to bring in the bowl of fruit, and Vicky, eager to change the subject, grabbed her phone to see if there was any existing soap dish store, expertly searching and tapping and enlarging, finally showing us photos of a few boat-shaped versions, and another inexplicably shaped like a rat.
When the meal was over, and only leftover grains of rice and single stray blueberries remained on the table, Aunt Minn returned to the kitchen and brought the landline phone to the table. The three of us formed a triangle around it, leaning in, and the nurse connected us to my mother’s room. This was the first time I’d spoken to my mother since the week before, when she’d been so hard to understand, her words upside down, inside out. “Hello?” she said, once it connected, and Aunt Minn and Vicky piped in right away with their greetings, “Hello, Aunt E!” “Hi, Elaine,” “What’s going on in Portland?” “What’s the weather like there?” “Hi, Mom,” I said, after a pause, and she let out a wave of glad sounds. “Francie,” she said, “Minnie. Vicky. I’m so happy to hear you all.”
It was immediately clear that she was better. Her voice had firmed back up. Her fluctuations of tones matched ours. Her sentences followed through. She asked how we were all doing, and Vicky jumped in, telling her about the upcoming fall play, and the blue tones she was hoping to use in the lighting scheme to fill the stage with a sense of mystery, and loss, which my mother listened to with interest, and Aunt Minn said something about how glad she was that Elaine was doing better, and that her shoulder was bothering her but on the whole she was doing fine, and I said how I’d made a big sale when I’d found a charming miniature grandfather clock in Atwater that had been broken but easy to fix. It was an exchange of health we were having, updates of functionality, and my mother responded to everyone with beautifully fitting noises of all kinds. When it was her turn, she told us about how her medication was much better, and she was feeling much more like herself again, and there was a job opening at the bakery down the street that she was considering applying for, and about how she was becoming closer with that friend Edward, the piano player of so many years with the strong lungs and the warm manner. Her voice sounded tinny and pleased through the phone lines. She asked what we’d had for dinner, which she always asked, and my aunt went through the menu, after which my mother told us that she and Edward had just read reviews online of a new restaurant in walking distance with an unusually special and reasonably priced eggplant dish that maybe sometime we could all try together. The three of us nodded; Aunt Minn clapped her hands. “Next visit!” my aunt said, “please.” At some point, Vicky got up to wipe down the table, and I watched all the last pieces of rice and blueberries connect to her sponge and gather together to fall into her hand. When we said goodbye, my mother sent kisses through the phone, and Aunt Minn walked the handset back to the kitchen.
As we headed to the kitchen to wash dishes, I could feel inside me the snag of an unfinished thought, although I couldn’t quite locate what it was. Vicky scraped the plates, and I rinsed, and Aunt Minn reordered the dishwasher to make space. It didn’t seem to come from the phone call—that had gone smoothly, and had eased something in me, like always, hearing my mother’s voice back to stable, and how the medications had kicked in. Although the illness could still swerve and jag inside her, the bounce-back was now notably faster and better. Vicky cleaned the serving plate with the small purple flowers that couldn’t fit in the dishwasher, and I rubbed it dry with a dishtowel, and as we moved through the routine we’d been through after so many meals before, folding in Uncle Stan’s parts, sweeping, neatening, all three of us talked about the latest news, including the disturbing sight of an influx of polar bears at certain villages in Russia, and a congressperson’s new bill about health care, and then we went over the phone conversation with my mother together, safe territory, revisiting the high points like we’d all just seen the same movie: Edward, bakery, eggplant dish.
Once the floor was clean, and the dishwasher began its series of hummings, I hugged Aunt Minn and Vicky, leaving them to each other, while I carried the unfinished thought within me, and its tiny, almost negligible, itch. My bus ride home was a beautiful lit hallway, traveling the streets. Other buses crossed in the opposite direction, wheeled containers full of gleaming white light. Inside mine, the only other passengers were an older man, nodding off to sleep, and a younger woman in a jogging suit, tapping away at her phone. The traffic lights were mostly green. We passed a mirrored office building, in which I could see our bus, moving through the squares, and the three of us plus driver inside it, and the woman’s focus on her phone reminded me of Vicky and her own looking up of the soap dishes, and right then the word sticky came back, and my thought returned to its track, a train lining up synaptically that I could now get on and ride. Sticky, I thought. It was the thing about the sticky memories. As we turned up Victory, I found, watching the man’s nodding head as a rhythmic companion to my thinking, that I had wanted to reconsider what Vicky had said at the table with her fork waving in the air—something about the idea of formed memories, of treating the memories like something to capture. It seemed useful to me. I could make some use of that idea. Perhaps, I thought, as I got off the bus and walked to my apartment, the nighttime wide and starless above, the quiet and tucked-away quality of Sunday evening, up the stairs and past some of my neighbors’ apartments, with the clinking of dishes in sinks, and the fading smell of fried meat, that was what I had been looking for.